By Godfrey Barker and Colin Randall
The Profits of Plunder - Art ownership under review
(The Gutmann case)
Colin Gleadell reports on Christie's worry over its star lot
Goering swapped 'decadent' impressionists for German old masters One woman's hunt for family treasuresLOOTED ART treasures stolen from Jews and now worth up to £15 billion were sent by Nazi Germany for safe-keeping in Switzerland during the Second World War, according to declassified British and American documents. Official papers lodged at the Public Record Office in Kew, west London, and in national archives in Washington show that many of the paintings, plundered from France, the Benelux countries and Eastern Europe, allegedly entered Switzerland in German diplomatic bags. Others were lodged in the Swiss freeports and those uncollected after the war will have become Swiss government property.
In 1943 Friedrich Gutmann and his wife, Louise, were murdered in the concentration camps by the Nazis, who also plundered their extraordinary art collection. Fifty years later their British grandsons have tracked down a number of the masterpieces, but now they face their toughest battle - the legal wrangle to get them back. By Peter Watson
ALBERT Yard, Glasshouse Walk, near London's Waterloo Station, is an unlovely neck of the woods. Railway lines, lock-up garages, tyre shops underneath the arches, a mini-cab dispatch office. Yet hidden away in this unexceptional, even ugly place there is an object of great beauty and even greater controversy. It is a painting by the French impressionist artist, Pierre Auguste Renoir that, it is claimed, had been looted by Nazis in the Second World War from Jews who perished at Auschwitz.
The oil painting, Le Poirier (1877), showing a pear tree in blossom, is currently in the possession of Brunilde Nunez de Baeza, a Spanish woman. But it is being claimed by two British brothers, Nick and Simon Goodman, and their Italian aunt, Lili Gutmann, who say it was one of a number of masterpieces stolen by Nazis in the early Forties from a warehouse in Paris, where the collection had been sent for safekeeping by Friedrich Gutmann, Lili's father and the brothers' grandfather.
Fourteen paintings from the collection of about 60 old masters and impressionists are still missing, including two Guardis last seen in London, but the Renoir is the third painting that the Goodmans have tracked down in the past four years. This ought to be good news but finding the pictures has been one thing; getting them back is quite another. The Goodmans now face the prospect of two court cases, one on either side of the Atlantic, later this year. For a family who suffered so cruelly during the war, losing two grandparents and a huge fortune, the Holocaust is still playing with their lives.
Until 1939 the Goodmans were the extremely wealthy and well-connected Gutmanns. The dynasty was founded by Eugen Gutmann, who in the late 19th century, after the unification of Germany, had the foresight to relocate a small provincial bank in Dresden to Berlin, seeing that that was where the profits were to be made. His bank, the Dresdener Bank, is now the second biggest in Germany.
It was Eugen, too, who helped finance the expansion of the new united Germany's chemical industries, on which the country's prosperity was based at the turn of the century. Eugen, who was Jewish, converted to Protestantism, not because he had a crisis of faith but because Bismark made it pretty plain that there would be no advancement while he remained Jewish.
After his conversion, Eugen did advance: he was made a Baron by the Kaiser and had his portrait painted by Max Liebermann, the principal impressionist painter in Germany and president of the Berlin Sezession. The painting was hung in the Gutmanns' enormous house on the Friedrichstrasse, in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate. A friend of King Faisal, Eugen was the first person in Berlin to have his own gym built at home. Eugen had several children, one of whom - Friedrich - was sent to Britain to run the London branch of the bank, where he was when the First World War broke out. Friedrich was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man, where he distinguished himself by establishing a theatre group. His wife, Louise, from Silesia and also a Jewish convert to Protestantism, was sent back to Germany with their son, Bernard, born in Surrey in 1914, as part of an exchange of non-combatants.
At the end of the war, Friedrich moved to Holland, where he was joined by Louise and Bernard, who had kept his British passport. In Amsterdam Friedrich started a Dutch branch of the Dresdener Bank and, like his father before him, was very successful. Eugen had collected German silver - the Gutmann silver collection was very famous in the early years of the century - but Friedrich was more interested in paintings. Old masters to begin with - Cranach, Guardi, Frans Hals, Hans Baldung Grien, even Holbein. These were kept at their large house on an estate at Heemstede, near Haarlem.
Then, in the early Thirties, Friedrich acquired his first impressionists, in particular some works by Degas, including Landscape with Smokestacks and Woman Warming Herself. Bernard's sister, Lili, who had been born in 1919, was delighted; young as she was she thought it was high time her father acquired some modern art.
In 1933, when Hitler came to power, all the Jewish employees of the Dresdener Bank including Friedrich were fired. Eugen was dead by then so Friedrich started his own bank, Proehl & Gutmann. He and his wife, Louise, cut as dashing a figure in Dutch society as Eugen had done in Berlin. Their house was furnished with Aubusson tapestries, fine furniture, and 50 to 60 old masters and impressionists. They had their portraits taken by Man Ray. They drove fast cars and acted as financial advisers to the Kaiser who, after his abdication, lived in Holland.
Bernard, who had a Dutch passport by now, in addition to his British one, came to Britain in the late Thirties to study art history at Cambridge. Lili had married an Italian and lived in Florence. As war loomed in 1939, Bernard changed his name to Goodman by deed poll and, as things got even worse, he was instructed by his father to stay in Britain, where he was working for the Red Cross. Despite his experience with the Dresdener Bank, Friedrich and his wife did not leave, apparently believing that since they were Protestant, had been so close to the Kaiser and were in other ways so well-connected, the rules would be different in Holland.
To Hitler, of course, as the world now knows, you were Jewish if either of your grandparents were Jewish and his laws applied in the occupied countries as much as in Germany. And so, bit by bit, the Gutmanns' world in Holland closed down. After the fall of Holland, Friedrich was not allowed to work and he and Louise were forced to wear the Yellow Star of David. To raise money on which to live, Friedrich mortgaged the estate at Heemstede. He had taken one precaution: in 1939 or 1940 he had sent the bulk of his art collection to Paris, into the care of a certain Paul Graupe, a well-known dealer. Then began the most difficult time. Friedrich received an unwelcome visit from Karl Haberstock. It is difficult to imagine a more chilling visitor than Haberstock, who was, in effect, Hitler's art dealer.
Haberstock was well known in Berlin in the Thirties and sold Hitler the Venus and Amor, by Paris Bordone, which hung in the Führer's mountain retreat throughout the war. He also had a hand in the appointment of Hans Posse as director of the Linz Museum, which Hitler planned for his home town in Austria. Interrogated by OSS (precursor of the CIA) after the war, Haberstock admitted that he had joined the Nazi Party as early as 1933 'because I hoped to gain influence, and be able to avoid extreme measures'. As the National Socialists increased their hold on the country, Haberstock ingratiated himself in right-wing circles by promoting Alfred Rosenberg's Combat League and supplying leading Nazis with art.
In 1938 a Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art was established in Berlin under the chairmanship of Josef Goebbels, its other members including Heinrich Hoffmann, the Reich's photographic reporter, Adolf Ziegler, Hitler's favourite living artist - and Haberstock. It was this commission which appointed four dealers to get rid of degenerate art. It confiscated thousands of works from German museums, burned much of the less valuable and sold the better paintings. It was Haberstock who suggested to Hitler and Goebbels that a public auction of 'degenerate art' might recoup foreign currency, leading to the notorious Fischer auction in Lucerne in June 1939, when 126 confiscated modern works were sold, including a Self-Portrait, by Van Gogh, a Tahitian Gauguin and four Picassos. After the fall of France, Haberstock operated from the Ritz Hotel in Paris in great style, with one set of documents authorised by Posse and a second set signed by Goering.
On his visit to Friedrich, in February 1941, Haberstock proposed what was in effect a forced sale. He was interested in the furnishings of the house, the tapestries, the objets d'art, even the paintings on the ceilings, and above all the Eugen Gutmann collection of German silver. Friedrich, alarmed by German military successes, concluded a deal on the furnishings, tapestries and objets d'art (the ceiling proved to be too firmly attached for the German workmen assigned to remove it) and a long inventory was prepared, with the Germans keen to make everything appear legal. But Friedrich refused to part with the silver, explaining that he was only a trustee and that other family members were the beneficiaries. Haberstock didn't like this obstacle but, for the time being, took no more action.
Friedrich and Louise were now thoroughly alarmed and requested permission to leave Holland and join their daughter, Lili, in Florence. They heard nothing for a while until two SS officers turned up unannounced at Heemstede on May 26, 1943, locked the Gutmanns in a room and looked over the estate. They then told Friedrich and Louise that they would be leaving Holland that evening to travel to Italy via Berlin and that they should pack.
The couple did so, putting what was left in the house into 14 suitcases, and were collected in the SS Mercedes. In Florence, Lili had been told the exact day she should expect her parents. When they didn't turn up, however, she wasn't unduly worried: in wartime travel was sometimes erratic. When they hadn't appeared on the third day, she began to worry and made inquiries through a family friend who was the papal nuncio in Berlin. Those inquiries went nowhere. It wasn't until the end of the war that she found out the awful truth.
What had happened was that the carriage in which Friedrich and Louise were travelling was uncoupled from the rest of the train at Berlin - and taken to Theresienstadt. This was the 'model' concentration camp, the one the Red Cross was allowed to inspect. At the camp, Friedrich was twice more asked to sign over the silver collection. Twice he refused. After his second refusal he was taken outside the main 'citadel' and clubbed until he was first unconscious, then dead. A few days later, Louise was transferred to Auschwitz and joined the millions of others who perished in the gas chambers. A few weeks after that, the Allies landed in northern France.
Lili found out the painful truth before Bernard, some time in 1944. Bernard, completely cut off in Britain, didn't find out until the war was over. The shock was made even worse by his discovery of what had happened to the estate. All the valuables had gone and the estate was in debt. Worse, the Dutch government, showing all the sensitivity for which certain post-war administrations have become notorious, told Bernard and Lili that they could not derive benefit from even the little that was left in Holland without a death certificate for at least one of their parents.
But this turned into Lili and Bernard's first coup. They traced a Czech woman who had survived Auschwitz and testified that she had seen Louise sent to the gas chambers. A death certificate was granted.
At the same time, Lili and Bernard had been chasing the objects their parents had been forced to sell to Haberstock and the paintings, which had been sent for safekeeping to Paris. Because Haberstock had made a meticulous inventory and was such a well-known figure many of the objets d'art, tapestries and furnishings he acquired through the forced sale were returned. The pictures were a different matter. It transpired that Paul Graupe had in turn placed the Gutmann pictures in a warehouse in the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, run by a Mrs Wacker-Bondy, and stored under the cover name of Muir. And there the pictures disappeared.
The chronology of events was reconstructed with the help of Allied army specialists, an outfit known as the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Commission, or MFAA, who were essentially art historians in uniform. During the last months of the war, before and after the fall of Berlin, MFAA officers unearthed the existence of a German unit called the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), standing for the Rosenberg Special Action Team. Alfred Rosenberg was theoretically the Nazi philosopher, but he was also the titular head of ERR, which employed some 400 officers whose sole purpose was to loot art and other valuables. Like Haberstock, with whom it worked closely, the ERR kept precise records and much of the art it seized was discovered in the spring of 1945 in a series of salt mines in Bavaria, where the cool temperature and dry air underground was perfectly suited to the storage of canvases.
One of the things that the Allied art historians turned up was that the ERR had raided the Wacker-Bondy warehouse in Paris. Another was that Graupe himself and a colleague, Arthur Goldschmidt who had said that the pictures were kept in the Wacker-Bondy warehouse, were themselves part of a network of dealers known to have exported several paintings out of Europe towards the end of the war via Switzerland and into America. Could their word be trusted?
A third factor emerged from the interrogations of leading Nazis carried out in and around Munich in late 1945, when it was discovered that certain leading Nazis, like Hitler, Goering and Himmler had a penchant for north European old masters - Cranach and Rubens in particular - and on occasions would agree to exchange several impressionist or post-impressionist paintings, 'degenerate art', for an old master or two. It was not uncommon for example, for 12 impressionists - Degas, Renoirs and Van Goghs - to be swapped for four Cranachs. The question naturally arose: had Graupe, Goldschmidt et al profited from the Nazis' appalling taste?
For the next 48 years of his life until his death in 1994 Bernard Goodman devoted himself to tracking down the 14 pictures that he knew were missing. And yet he never found any of them.
Bernard had been brought up to believe that he would inherit his father's estate and bank. But instead both his parents had been murdered by the Nazis and the family fortune had disappeared. It is hardly surprising that he found it difficult to adjust to the post-war realities of life. He found work easily enough, mainly as a travel agent, but his heart was never in it. One of the reasons he worked for a travel firm was the perks in air tickets, so he could more easily afford to visit galleries around Europe, looking out for his paintings.
In September 1943 he married Dee Simpson, a descendant of the first surgeon to use anaesthetic and herself an impresario who brought Beyond the Fringe from Cambridge to the West End. Nick Goodman was born in 1945 and Simon in 1948. They grew up in central London, in the smart red-light district of Shepherd's Market. Both attended the French Lyc&eeacute;e in South Kensington (alongside Jacqueline Bisset and Charlotte Rampling) and so were soon able to converse freely with the prostitutes near their home who, in the post-war world, were mainly French.
They rarely talked freely with their father. Always taciturn, as the years went by Bernard grew more and more sullen, according to Simon, until he reached the point where he had no small talk whatsoever. He was obsessed by the paintings and loathed any reference to the Holocaust, to the extent that the boys were trained to switch off the television the second there was anything about the Second World War or the camps.
Bernard never told the boys what had been lost or that searching for the pictures was the only thing he lived for. He was a broken man and couldn't unburden himself. Both sons moved to Los Angeles around 1980 (independently of each other) and married American women. Nick is a production designer in the film business, and Simon imports British records and CDs.
It was not until 1994, the year of their father's death, that his two sons finally learnt the full story of their father's obsession. In December that year, Simon rang his aunt Lili in Florence to wish her a happy Christmas. At that stage it had just become clear, thanks to two art historians working at museums in Moscow and Kiev, that the Russians had been hiding hundreds if not thousands of art works looted in Berlin in 1945.
'Perhaps ours will be among them,' said Lili.
'What are you talking about?' replied Simon. Whereupon his aunt told him the story. A short while later, the brothers received their father's desk as part of the settlement of his estate. And inside they found it crammed with documents - in French, Dutch, German, Russian and English, going back to 1945. Astonished, they gradually pieced together the story of their father's hunt, learning about art as they went along. Then came the third - and decisive - coincidence. Rummaging in the LA County Library among 'every book ever written on Degas', Simon stumbled across one of the missing paintings. Landscape with Smokestacks, had featured in a book, Degas Landscapes, by the British Art Historian Jonathan Kendall, and had only recently been shown at an exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where, according to the catalogue, it was owned by a Daniel Searle, of Chicago, whose family fortune stems from pharmaceuticals.
Excited, the Goodmans now turned to Tom Kline, a Washington lawyer familiar with art litigation cases. Kline wrote to Searle's lawyers. Through his lawyers, Searle hit the roof. He had bought the picture in good faith, he said, and on the recommendation of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is a trustee. Early on Searle, through his lawyer, Howard Trienans, of Sidley and Austin, disputed that the picture had ever been owned by Friedrich Goodman. At this point, Kline called in Willi Korte, a German-born, Washington-based lawyer and historian who has made a speciality of locating missing Second World War loot. From a Swiss art dealer named Walter Feilchenfeldt, a descendant by marriage of Paul Cassirer, the legendary Berlin dealer, Korte found an auction catalogue dating to 1931, which showed that Cassirer sold the Degas - to Friedrich Gutmann.
After this evidence was presented to Searle, he offered a settlement. The Goodmans won't say how much but made clear they considered the offer unacceptable. Searle then counter-claimed with two arguments. The first is that the painting was sent to Paris by Friedrich not for storage but for sale. The painting, he said, was bought before the war by one Hans Wendland, who sold it afterwards to a Basel-based collector, one Hans Fankhauser, and in 1951 he sold it to Emile Wolf, a collector who lived in New York and died last year. On this scenario, a legitimate sale was effected and title passed from Gutmann legally to Wendland to Fankhauser to Wolfe to Searle in 1987.
Against this, the Goodmans say that for anyone familiar with the fate of Jewish-owned art during the Second World War the name of Hans Wendland is no less notorious than that of Haberstock. Wendland spent most of the war in Switzerland where his speciality was in helping Hitler and Goering swap 'degenerate' art, such as Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh and Picasso for the bland old masters relished by the Nazi leadership. Douglas Cooper, a British army interrogator, collector and friend of Picasso, was the author of a secret wartime report on Looted Works of Art in Switzerland, where he described Wendland as 'devious', 'evasive' and 'uncooperative under interrogation'. In 1942, according to a British Ministry of Economic Warfare document, Wendland took delivery of 'a whole railway-van full of art from Paris' from the transport firm Wacker-Bondy. On top of all that, Hans Fankhauser was related to Wendland by marriage.
But in any case, say Searle's lawyers, the Goodmans did not employ due diligence in looking for the painting for the several years when it was on show. Searle points to the fact that the painting was on display in Harvard in 1968 and later at Williams College Massachusetts even before he bought it in 1987.
The Goodmans say their father had spent all his life looking for the Degas and they didn't know about the missing paintings until their father died. Even after they found out about the paintings they were in California thousands of miles from the exhibitions where the Degas were on show in East Coast museums. Apart from the Metropolitan, the pictures were exhibited in small museums.
While these discussions were going on, Nick Goodman had dinner with David Jaffe, curator of 19th-century paintings at the Getty Museum. He outlined the story to Jaffe and showed him the photographs that Bernard used to try to track down his lost paintings over the years. Two weeks later, Jaffe was on the phone. 'I found one of your Renoirs,' he said. Indeed he had. A second painting that had belonged to Friedrich had been auctioned at Parke-Bernet in New York, in 1969. This was Renoir's Le Poirier. Parke-Bernet was bought by Sotheby's, so Kline wrote to it asking for the name of the person who had bought the painting, in order that they might be contacted.
Sotheby's resisted vigorously, saying it had a duty of confidentiality to its clients. The matter was batted back and forth for a number of months. As part of the documentation to support their case, the Goodmans sent Sotheby's a memo. This, dated April 7, 1964, was written by Rose Valland, a wartime resistance heroine in France, who managed to keep tabs on most of the paintings which the ERR looted from Paris. The Valland memo confirms that a painting by Renoir, Pommier (ou Poiriers en Fleurs), was stored by Paul Graupe 'chez Madame Wacker-Bondy', that it formed part of the Gutmann collection, and that it was seized by the ERR. The memo also listed other paintings as taken from Paris, including the two Degas, and a painting by Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap.
Then came the next extraordinary coincidence. Just over a year ago, at the end of January 1997, Sotheby's in New York held a sale of old masters. A day or so after it had taken place, Lili Gutmann received a call from Christina Koenigs, a Dutch friend whose family also lost its collection during the war (it surfaced five years ago in Moscow). Koenigs drew Lili's attention to the Sotheby's sale, which featured Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap and which listed F. Gutmann, Heemstede, Holland, in the Provenance. This was the very painting listed in the Valland memo, which had been sent to Sotheby's some time before.
Even though the sale had taken place, Tom Kline, the Goodmans' lawyer, was able to prevent the painting leaving Sotheby's premises in Manhattan. A flurry of legal manoeuvres followed, which ended in the Goodmans and the seller of the painting, an Italian man whose name has not been released, sitting down in a room together, without any lawyers being present. An accommodation was soon reached.
So the last case that arose has been settled first. Meanwhile, the Goodmans were forced to take Sotheby's to court in New York, where the auction house was finally instructed to divulge the name of the person who, in good faith, bought the Renoir. In a statement, Sotheby's says, 'Client confidentiality is not unique either to Sotheby's or the auction business. If disclosing the identity of a buyer becomes important, as with the Renoir, we do our best to achieve a satisfactory resolution for both parties while preserving client confidentiality. In this instance, we provided the lawyers acting for the Gutmann family with the name of the lawyers acting for the purchaser of the Renoir painting in 1969.' It turned out that the painting was bought by a Mr and Mrs Navarro who, in or around 1971-72, transferred the Renoir to a Liechtenstein Foundation, called the Nagara Foundation, thence to Casanella, another Liechtenstein Foundation. After her husband died Mrs Navarro remarried, changing her name to Baeza. Several other trusts and settlements were created, in the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands, and title in the painting followed suit until it is now the property of the Mallard Corporation, Fishlock Road, Roadtown, Tortola, BVI. However, in order to assert their rights, the current owners have recently sued the Goodmans and from court documents in London it appears that the beneficial owner is Brunilde Nunez de Baeza. And that the painting is being stored in London, in the Martinspeed warehouse in Glasshouse Walk.
The Goodmans, though prepared to go to court if they have to, are scarcely looking forward to it. They have already been in court more times than they ever imagined possible and although lawyers in the US work on a contingency basis, this is seldom true in Britain. But both Nick and Simon, and Lili, feel they must press ahead. 'It has been a very painful time,' says Simon. 'Nick and I have had to delve into family history that we thought we knew but didn't. Our father was broken by the war, and by what happened - or rather didn't happen - afterwards. He operated alone, before computer records or the new mood abroad created by the scandal over the Swiss gold and dormant bank accounts.
'We haven't made any money out of this. On the contrary, we are behind, but we have to see it through. What happened was dreadful. I am saddened by my father's sadness, but also angry at the way he was treated by society. This story goes on until there is some kind of closure.'
LORD Janner voiced suspicion yesterday that the Vatican may be covering up details of its involvement in the plundering of Jewish-owned art by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
He said in Washington that the Roman Catholic authorities in Rome were refusing to open up archives from the era. As chairman of the Holocaust Education Trust, he had made a series of requests to the Vatican but received no reply. "If the Vatican has nothing to hide, they should open the archives," he said. Lord Janner was speaking at an international conference discussing how to reclaim stolen works of art for Holocaust survivors.
He said: "We are certain that into the Vatican came not only human beings, SS people on their way out, but property, art, assets. We have no idea what; and we're saying to them, as we do to every other country and authority, please tell us what happened. Please tell us the truth." He stressed that he did not believe that the present Pope was aware of the problem.
According to a survey by Ronald Lauder, chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, virtually "every art museum" in the Western world had Nazi loot. A review of 225 museum catalogues by his staff found 1,700 stolen pieces.
He urged governments and galleries to return the art or auction it to help Jews. "It is time for museums to set the same standard for ownership that they expect of themselves for authenticity. Is the art genuine? Is the art genuinely theirs?"
France is refusing to auction 2,058 works of art, many by masters such as Picasso, that have been dubbed the "last prisoners-of-war" by the World Jewish Congress. All have been advertised on the Internet, but Paris has been unable to trace the original owners.
President Chirac has said the paintings are part of France's heritage and must remain in the country. A French delegate to the Washington gathering, Louis Amigues, said it was "not the French way" to go to auction. "The French way is to try to find the owners or their heirs. The art belongs to them and nobody else."
? French Jews strongly support the government's refusal to sell Nazi-looted art to compensate Holocaust victims worldwide, preferring to keep the works in France, a Jewish leader said yesterday.
Henri Hajdenberg, president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, said that if the owners were not traced within 10 years the government should estimate the value, then put that sum towards building a new Holocaust centre in France.